Mandarin characters don’t tell you how to pronounce a word. They are more like pictures that represent an object or an idea. Burt: Correct! Mandarin characters don’t give us the sound of a word, so ...

Mandarin Chinese is spoken by over a billion people across Asia and around the globe, making it a useful language for travelers to know. Learning pinyin, which romanizes Chinese characters, can ...

FEW people live to 111. Fewer still leave as big a mark on linguistic lives as Zhou Youguang, who died on January 14th. Mr Zhou was the chief architect of pinyin, the system that the Chinese use to ...

The father of hanyu pinyin, Mr Zhou Youguang, turned 109 on Tuesday. The linguist and dissident came up with the system of transliterating Chinese characters into roman letters in the 1950s. The ...

Between 1993 and 1995, I taught English in Hsinchu for the China External Trade Development Council (CETRA). CETRA is now the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) and its name change ...

Zhou Youguang, a onetime Wall Street banker from China who developed Pinyin, a Romanised writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn to read and write ...

Ever since I lived in Taiwan as a child, I've wanted to learn Mandarin. I was supposed to do that at university but decided on Hindi. Then I was supposed to move to the Chinese mainland after Japan ...